Contractor accused of hacking for nude teen pics

A former contractor who worked at an American military base in Iraq is accused of hacking into teenage girls' computers in the U.S., coercing many of them into giving him revealing photos, authorities said Tuesday.

Irish-born Patrick Connolly was charged with a single count of computer hacking following his arrest Friday in Atlanta, authorities said.

"Right now, he's facing some very serious charges," said Steve Cole, a U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman.

Connolly had an initial court appearance in Atlanta on Monday and was expected to be moved in the next several days to Orlando, where he will have a detention hearing in federal court.

Authorities have 30 days to obtain an indictment and more charges could be filed.

Six of the seven teenage girls named as victims in the criminal complaint lived in Florida -- the Space Coast, Orlando and Miami -- but authorities said he contacted teenage girls around the world beginning in 2005.

The criminal complaint said Connolly worked in Baghdad for Tennessee-based EOD Technology Inc., a U.S. Department of Defense contractor, but a spokesman said he was no longer a contract employee with the company. William Pearse, a company vice president, said EOD Technology officials cooperated with authorities.

Authorities said the teenage girls first would get persistent instant messages from an unfamiliar address. Connolly was known by screen names such as "Casperlovesya" and cucumbersn," officials said.

When the girls asked who the sender was, they would get the response, "I'm your computer hacker." A request to send revealing photos would soon follow. If they refused, the hacker would threaten to post personal information online about the teenagers gathered from infiltrating their computers.

Many of the girls complied.

At various times Connolly threatened to hurt a teen age girl's sister, deleted permanent files on the computer of a second teenage girl for refusing to send suggestive images and warned he would send explicit webcam images made by a third teen age girl to her grandmother if she didn't take more photos of herself, according to the criminal complaint.

He also showed up at the Orlando workplace of the third teen age girl, who was 16 at the time, wanting to take her to the Universal Studios theme park, the criminal complaint said. She refused.

Connolly embedded programs into the computers which gave him remote control of the computers and allowed him to look at photos and read files belonging to the teenage girls, according to the complaint.

FBI agents were helped in their investigation by a former accomplice who told authorities that he "shared victims" with Connolly. Ivory Dickerson pleaded guilty in 2007 to manufacturing child pornography and possessing child pornography.

Authorities said he had upward of 4,000 victims on his computer. Despite his cooperation, Dickerson, of Seven Lakes, N.C., was sentenced to 110 years in prison. Dickerson has since filed a motion to vacate the sentence.

After investigating him for five years, FBI agents were put back on Connolly's trail last January after he contacted via Facebook one of the teenage girls he had harassed years earlier.

Connolly created a Facebook profile and immediately searched for the names of the teenage girls he had threatened years earlier, the criminal complaint said.